For Leonardo Drew, the most rewarding part of being an artist is being challenged—working endless hours consumed by impulses to push limits and attack conventions. Testament to this is his Brooklyn studio, where explosive large-scale sculptures and assemblages line the walls and traces of his diligent practice flood the industrial space. “My rewards are actually the challenges,” Drew told me during a recent visit. “[In] the end it’s about the making of the art… about the journey.” A recent journey—and a formidable challenge—goes on view this week, in a new exhibition at Pace Prints.

Some 30 years into
his artistic career, Drew is thriving. With a steady stream of exhibitions in
Dallas, Helsinki, and Santa Fe slated for the coming months, he works all day,
every day, out of his own volition, rather than necessity. Any concept of a
work-life balance is left at the door of the Cypress Hills studio where he lives
and works, located in an industrial brick building on a quiet residential
street. He moved to the space in 2007, following many years in Williamsburg and
Washington Heights. Drew was attracted to the neighborhood’s energy and,
surprisingly, the nearby cluster of cemeteries, which seems fitting given that
his works often explore decay and regeneration. The artist mentions that Mondrian’s tombstone is nearby, a little-known
fact that he and a friend uncovered a few years ago.

Upon entering the
studio, a pair of smaller workshop-like chambers lead to a giant, windowless
room filled with sculptures in various stages of completion. The surfaces are
covered with buckets of black medium, stacks of assorted wood, tarps, refuse,
bins of nails and screws, and a variety of other hardware and power tools.
Small swatches of various textures are hung on one wall, each one a sample of
the larger, realized works. Drew greets me from upstairs and quickly dives into
a frank discussion of his practice, his process, forays into printmaking, and
his ideology as an artist. Simultaneously, he sits down and gets to work,
rapidly applying colorful paint chips to a rectangular panel. He speaks freely
and laughs often.

Leonardo Drew, age 13. Courtesy Leonardo Drew.

Drew’s practice
traces back to his childhood. He grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, making art
in a bedroom that he shared with five brothers. As a 13-year-old he was
featured in his first exhibition, among a group of peers, a moment which is
commemorated by a newspaper photograph of a young Drew standing next to a
larger-than-life painting of Captain America. “I was drawing directly from
television, what I was seeing,” he recalls. “And then I was introduced to Norman Rockwell and Maxwell Parrish, and I started
copying their stuff. And then I graduated to Jackson Pollock. [Laughs]
Once I saw Jackson Pollock, that was it. It was like: This is where I want to
be.” He moved to New York for college and studied illustration at Parsons
before transferring to Cooper Union, where he earned his BFA. Following art
school he worked at Christie’s for two years and saved up enough money to
pursue art full-time. He never looked back.

“All my life has been
like this very ‘monk-like’ approach to living—getting up and making art,” Drew
explains. Despite being at an established point in his career, his work ethic
and dedication to studio time hasn’t wavered. “I have a personality that says:
Yes, you’re very social. But actually, I don’t get out that often … It’s like
we all need to become reclusive at some point—in order to make our work.” And
it’s at this successful stage, with a small team of assistants, that he’s able
to simultaneously make art that sustains his career and art that motivates him
and helps him grow as an artist. Gesturing over to a work on one side of the
studio he explains, “That’s good, but it’s not the kind of work I should be
focusing on, it’s not going to push me to the next place.” He motions to one of
the monstrous assemblages that hangs on the wall beside him and explains, “That
feeds me, it challenges.”

When asked where he
hopes the works he’s most passionate about will ultimately live, Drew laughs
and replies, “right here in the studio.” We’re surrounded by giant structures,
made primarily from wood, many of which seem too large to ever leave. “Usually
I’m rotating seven things at a time, just to sort of keep the juices flowing,
keep the ideas going,” he explains. Drew is known for reworking and recycling
his pieces, keeping certain works in a constant state of incompletion. “They call
it cannibalism, I just take old work and turn it into new work,” he offers.
“There’s always layering that happens because life is going on so you’re
layering things that you’re experiencing ... It just keeps perpetuating itself.
So there’s never a moment where there’s anything that’s unsuccessful. It’s just
that it’s continuing on.” Exhibitions keep the artist on track and propel him
to bring works to a state of completion. “The work has to be shown, so you have
to finish. So that’s the reality,” he reasons. “It’s like the kid that’s still
in the backyard and he’s like, ‘I’m still playing, man!’ It’s like, ‘I’m not
ready to come in yet.’ You get called in for the next exhibition.”

The new print works
debuting at Pace Prints were created at the Pace Paper studio in Gowanus, but
they all began in Drew’s studio. “What I did here in the studio was I created
works that we could then make molds from,” he explains. “It was almost like we
were putting a puzzle together, [combining] different things that I was working
on, and then putting them in the press, experimenting with it, and seeing what
would come out from the other end.” The new prints, textural, undulating works
printed in the artist’s characteristic earth tones, as well as shimmering pale
blue and silvery palettes, present an alternate vision of Drew’s sculptural
practice, translating signature elements of his large-scale work to printed
media—which required experimentation and innovation.

Leonardo Drew and Ruth Lingen at Pace Paper. Courtesy Pace Prints.

Beginning in 2012,
Drew “made the rounds” at Pace Editions studios, trying his hand at the varied
processes—including etching, lithographs, and papermaking—and becoming more
familiar with the techniques and their potentials. “I even did some experiments on all of them
just to sort of see where my language was going to fall, where my vocabulary
would fall within the printmaking parameters,” he explains. “In the end, it was
kind of like an epiphany... I didn’t know until it was actually happening what
the work was going to look like. It was going to be actually more sculpture
than traditional printmaking. And that was that.” Through an intensive,
collaborative process with director Ruth Lingen and papermaker Akemi Martin, Drew developed new processes and solutions to translate his
three-dimensional practice into printed media. “I didn’t realize it at the time
because I didn’t know what the parameters were; I was asking to do things that
had never been done before,” the artist explains. “I’ve got to give credit to
Akemi and Ruth because they never said ‘no.’ I just kept saying, ‘Okay, let’s
try this,’ or ‘let’s do this.’ And they kept flipping over backwards.”

From smaller
cast-paper works to larger prints assembled from five pieces of handmade
pigmented paper, Drew challenged himself, and the printmakers at Pace Prints.
Lingen told me that within his prints “there are things that we haven’t done
before, mostly because he’s giving us so much raw material from his sculptural
studio... He’ll send us over these crazy three-dimensional things and want us
to figure out how to work with them, so we’ve taken that on as a challenge.”
Regarding the larger, 95-inch works, she explains, “The way they’re made is
primarily through wooden cores that are actually sort of bas-relief pieces of
wood with collage materials glued to them, and then we basically ink them up
and put fresh sheets of pigmented handmade paper down on them and press them
while the whole thing is wet.” The pieces are then taken out of the press, and
left to dry. “We’ve been making mostly editions of four for each piece, and so
we’ll go through all the pieces—two bottom sections that are 48-inch squares,
the core piece in the middle of the top, and then two side pieces—and what
we’ll do is we hold up all the bottoms and [Drew will] say which combination he
likes, and then we’ll hold the core and sides up and he’ll do the same for
that.”

“The medium has
changed, that’s all, but the language is still me,” Drew notes, says of the
resulting prints. “What it comes down to is that the questions that I ask are
not necessarily going to be the same as another artist’s. My journey is
different from another person’s, so inevitably the work will definitely have to
become me. The material has to become me, the situation has to become me.”